In a way I suppose it’s partly jealousy. After all, Scott Kelby is the author of many international bestsellers, all of which focus on the art and craft of photography. I could be so lucky. Or clever.
But I do have other, more valid reasons to think less of Scott’s latest book. And it’s this: he has SUCH influence and he’s peddling rubbish. With influence comes responsibility!
I’m trying to plough through his latest book on Lightroom, the incredibly long-winded “the Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2 book for digital photographers“. Now while I’m no expert on Lightroom, I do know a fair bit about digital asset management, and over the course of the last 4 years or so, my views on the subject have been largely informed by the world’s leading expert on the subject, Peter Krogh. Digital Asset Management is a broad subject that covers the management of images from the time they come off the camera all the way through to their permanent homes in our archives.
Lightroom is of course an application that covers a lot more than digital asset management, but if you use it, it does have a large role in that process, so it’s good to understand the basics behind DAM to get the most out of it.
And it’s here that Kelby’s book falls over for me. It covers all aspects of Lightroom, and I’m quite happy with what I’ve read in the other sections, but the first section, the section on the Library, is what I’m struggling so much with. It is in there, understandably, that all “digital asset management” type functions occur.
If you are not really aware of what sort of program Lightroom is exactly, well it’s no real surprise. In a way it’s trying to be everything to everyone. And it seems to do a damn good job of most of it. It looks slick. It aids workflow, and allows you to focus on the photography. But ignoring the beautifully designed interface and all the bells and whistles, under the hood it is a parametric image editor, coupled together with a cataloging application. Of course it can also spit out galleries, slideshows and prints like there’s no tomorrow. It has a modular design, so these modules can be added to in the future (if and when Abode can think of some new ones – hdr anyone?) But at its heart, it’s a catalog and an image editor. It looks like it does the image editing really well (as I said I don’t use it regularly yet, but have looked it over), and I’m not surprised, as it uses the latest Camera Raw engine to do the heavy lifting. But from what I can see, and from many other informed reports on the DAM forum, it doesn’t do quite as good a job on the cataloging side. Never mind, no program is perfect at release 2.5.
Digital Asset Management can be seen to be built up of two parts – a part that is (or at least can be) software independent (file naming conventions, folder organisation, metadata, star ratings, labels, all that stuff that sits in the dng or xmp file and is read by a host of programs like Bridge, Lightroom, PhotoMechanic etc.)Â And then there’s how we can use those files in a catalog application.
My problem with Scott is that he gets the first part utterly wrong. Lightroom is an application that takes responsibility for a large number of those core DAM issues, so it’s very important that they get implemented well. And it’s not Lightroom that’s at fault here. It can do what needs to be done. But it does have to be told how to do it by the user. And this is where Scott loses me. He is responsible for the training of hundreds of thousands of people, not only in how to use Lightroom, but also how to approach DAM. Because for many, this will be the first time they encounter any sort of cataloging program, and they need instruction in the very basics. Instead what do they get? Kelby’s very uninformed approach to DAM. He’s teaching hundreds of thousands of people how NOT to do it. It’s hard to read. It’s even harder when you realise the damage this is doing.
Let me take the most offending example, so you can see I’m not just jealous (note the word just). On page 42-43 he talks about star ratings, a feature so ubiquitous now that even Microsoft is supporting them natively in Windows. Initially, Scott’s sage advice (not) is to rate your best photos as 5 stars. ‘Who gives a damn really about 2 or 3 star images’ he says. Either you delete ’em or you love em. (paraphrasing here, I don’t have the book in front of me). Well Scott, there are many reasons you are totally wrong, including something called the ratings pyramid. What happens in 20 years when you have 20,000 out of your 40,000 images as 5 star and the other 20,000 are no stars… Where’s the pyramid then? What value does your collection have if you can’t separate your absolute best images from your good ones and your OK ones. The value in a ratings pyramid is being lonely at the top. You don’t want it crowded up there. And by using 5 stars immediately, he’s leaving no room for growth. What about in ten years time, when you’re a better photographer (everyone gets better if they keep at it). You can’t start marking your best shots at 6 stars…
And then it gets worse. Not only does he sooo not get the whole star ratnig system and why that is an absolutely integral part of any Digital Asset Managment plan, he then tells you to not even bother using them, but to use flags instead. Flags? Are they supported in Bridge? PhotoMechanic? Expression Media? Any other cataloging program? I don’t think so. Do you want to lock yourself into one application? Isn’t it smarter to use a system where the info lives in the file and can be read by a large number of programs? The star system (and labels to a slightly lesser degree) are a defacto standard. You can change applications and the system goes with you. Scott should know that.
I think it’s staggering someone as educated and influential as him could peddle such downright poor information. I like Lightroom to a degree, and I think that it will become the leading DAM application (if it’s not already). Microsoft seem to have given up on Expression Media (which in any case is only a cataloging app, not an editor as well). But if Lightroom is the future, it’s even more important that people are shown how to use the DAM sides of it in a logical, extensible and transferable way. That’s exactly what Scott hasn’t done.
Scott, if you come across this, I’d like an explanation!
Leave A Comment